Monty Brewster, Donald Trump, and the American Dream

I watched Brewster’s Millions (with Richard Pryor) as a child; it was one of those movies my parents insisted I would enjoy even though it didn’t look like much at first to my kid brain. But it left about as much impact on me as any marginally-entertaining few hours of my first ten years, and I remember the basic premise and conclusion to this day.

More recently, after a full decade of adulthood and beginning a class in accounting, I decided to re-watch the film and investigate a new idea about what it really says about money and the people who have it.

The premise, for those of you who haven’t read the synopsis, is that Monty Brewster inherits $300,000,000 from an eccentric estranged uncle on one condition: that he spend no less than $30,000,000 in exactly a month, without accumulating any assets. If he fails or if he tells anyone, he gets nothing. A sexy accountant from the law firm is tasked with following him around and meticulously documenting his spending.

Sounds fun, right? Not only does the lower-class protag get to go on a monthlong spending spree the likes of which most of us can only dream of, but at the end of it he’s rich beyond his wildest imaginings three hundred times over. The film opens with a text crawl: “Montgomery Brewster... got handed the American Dream... on a very hot plate.”

That’s a detail I didn’t remember from my childhood viewing, and it threw me for a loop when I saw it this time around. Now, I have to admit the whole idea of an “American Dream” always perplexed me. It always seemed at once uselessly vague and annoyingly prescriptive. Middle school social studies teachers alternately described it as “wanting a better life for yourself and your family” and something about white picket fences, one of which is far from limited to this one country and the other of which is, last I checked, limited to only a small percent of Americans, most of whom live in the grayscale neighborhoods of Pleasantville. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this supposed American dream, it has nothing to do with being “handed” anything, no matter how hot the plate is. It’s about working hard to get ahead, as implausible as that is in the real world.

But here’s the thing, and this is why I decided to re-watch the film in the first place. Most of us aren’t handed a great big hunk of cash just because some relative we may or may not know has died. Or because some relative we do know is still alive and wants to make sure we have all the best things from cars to educational opportunities to the occasional get-out-of-jail-free card. But here’s that thing I was just talking about: some of us are. We live in an unbalanced society where a privileged few do get handed a great deal that they didn’t earn.

Now many of those currently obnoxiously wealthy would like you to know that they did work for what they have. They may have had some help in the beginning - a few generous investments in their initial enterprises, a modest inheritance they spent wisely in order to make it grow rather than shrink, that kind of thing. They didn’t just fritter away what they had, as the common people would, and their current success is a testament not to their luck but to their keen skills as investors and entrepreneurs. Thus, these billionaires, despite their early windfalls, are truly self-made men.

Brewster’s Millions tells a different kind of story. Its protagonist is given an amazing amount, and he isn’t instructed “be careful, this has to last.” He isn’t told, “you need to invest this money wisely if you don’t want to end up right where you stared.” He has to spend as much money as he can in just a month. He’s highly motivated to waste it all and end up broke. He’s not just burning through a million dollars a day because he doesn’t know how to invest wisely. He wants to lose it all. He wants to have nothing to show for it at the end of the month.

And you know what? The story’s old enough that I won’t feel bad spoiling it for you. He fails. Every time he thinks he’s come up with a brilliant scheme to lose money, he ends up earning even more. He only technically wins because he gets threatened with a lawsuit with less than two minutes left on the clock, and offers to pay for that sexy accountant to get a law degree and represent him with the last bit of cash he’s got. Yeah, it was a nailbiter right to the end. But it just goes to show that losing money is every bit as difficult as getting it.

And that’s really the crux of the matter, right? We live in a world where not only is it hard for the poor to get rich, but it’s just as hard for the rich to get poor. When someone gets a windfall and later ends up on a trajectory into the upper echelons of wealth and power, it’s easy for them to see themselves as self-made. But how much of their wealth was really the result of their own hard work and good decision-making, and how much of it is just due to the nature of large sums of money to multiply even in the hands of simpletons?

And what does it say about the American Dream?